A basic review, but not much more

Enterprise JavaBeans 2.1 by Denninger and Peters is a basic summary of all of the major features of EJBs. It covers the typical J2EE architecture, the three types of beans, issues such as transactionality and security, and gives some examples where EJBs would be useful - all of the standard stuff such a book would be expected to contain. It would serve fairly well as an introduction to EJB concepts or as a reference.

The book is not much more than this, though. I would have liked to have read about some of the authors' real experience with EJB's, both good and bad. What are their opinions on the high points or J2EE, as well as the shortfalls? What are some of the practical aspects that tend to trip up people and organizations who use EJBs? Every developer who has used J2EE knows it is not always easy, it is not always container- or platform-independent, and the solutions are not always the best (take, for example, CMP, especially pre-EJB 2.0). For example, this sentence from the book, while clearly an ideal espoused by Sun, is something many experienced developers have learned is not always achieved: "In the development of enterprise-related logic in Enterprise Beans the developer is freed totally from having to deal with technical system issues". Finally, based on the title of the book, I was hoping for a section on what's new in EJB 2.1, but instead found only occasional mentions of 2.1 features throughout the different sections.

I wouldn't recommend Enterprise JavaBeans 2.1, except perhaps as a first introduction. It's too much a straightforward summary of the EJB specification that could have come straight from Sun Microsystems, and is lacking much realistic advice on EJB usage.

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